August 31st, 1991
Portraits were chosen and gently removed and replaced with non-charmed replacements, robes were packed, contraband was thoroughly hidden and locked up, Artemis and Apollo, our Eurasian Eagle owls, were set in the reception hall, miscellaneous items were pulled.
All that was left was a list to be made. A list of every significant moment my brother was fated to have this year. Strictly speaking, I didn’t need to write it all down to remember it but I’ve always preferred to have a picture of my own list in my head instead of thoughts alone. It made everything feel more real. Real in a way I struggled to appreciate both here and in elsewhere.
When you can recall every minor detail of your entire life, from birth to death, thinking is simply overwhelming. Thinking inevitably requires me to pull up a memory -a memory of reading words on a yellowed page bound in a half-beaten book or the three pieces of lint that caught on the light when a professor spoke, and looking at a moment in time with such detail had always made me feel like I could pause the movie of my life. I could always recall facial expressions, body language, exact words said. There were a thousand patterns I recognize in a day. A million hints at the truth.
Even now, simply thinking about my own mind pulls memories from the far recesses of my mind, thirty years ago and the picture is crisp as ever. Unmarred by time. I had found a book on pharmacology tucked safely away in the office. I was skimming it, allowing my eyes to simply log the details into my memory. Until I flipped the page and came across I word I’d never seen before. I had never read medical texts before, so it wasn’t surprising. But it meant to understand the book I would have to work at it - pull medical dictionaries, hunt for the term, and then look up any additional words in the text. It was exhilarating. Everything had grown boring when it was all so easy to learn. So I ripped out all the indexes of the medical dictionaries, I stuck only to printed editions, and whenever I had free time I would devour them. This was different than what I had been doing up until then. Before, I had simply let my eyes scan the page and memorize the words so I could pull them up in my minds eye if I needed them. It had never failed me before, but it meant I had never understood the value of knowledge. It had always been at my fingertips. That was why I had gravitated to sports and mind games -knowledge and pattern recognition helped, but my body wasn’t inherently the fastest or strongest, it was a type of learning I had to work for, meanwhile people don’t respond the same and their actions have a pattern that required dissection to identify.
I let myself swim through the memories of elsewhere, letting out a smooth breath as I checked in to the present. I was sitting in the office Father had scolded me in, parchment and several quills laid out in front of me. As my eyes focused I picked up one of the quills, it was a rather nice quill made up of a silver feather from the back of a thunderbird. The other three quills were all made up of thunderbird feathers despite their different coloring, one was an electrifying blue, another a shimmering gold, and the final quill was iridescent. It was one of the gifts from my eleventh birthday, and Father had told me they all came from a single thunderbird that had been rampaging across the States. The feathers were taken at different stages of the storms the fowl had conjured -the final feather being gifted to the procurer by the beast itself when the wizard had managed to unhook the enchanted wire that had wrapped itself around the beasts leg.
The tips of the quills had been accented with fluid crystal and charmed to both be self-refilling and spell checking. The inkwell used to magically refill them could be altered to use different magical ink and had several linked wells with different effects.
Just imagining Father and Mother going up to the wizard who had these and propositioning them for the feathers the man had risked his life for makes me wish I was a fly in that room. Was he offended? Shocked? Pleased to have such a lucrative opportunity?
“Fate has already begun turning,” I said in a hushed tone as I wrote a single line on the parchment in front of me, “Let’s ignore anything Draco isn’t involved in for this year. If Tibble doesn’t survive, that’s on him.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
‘Year 1 - Things Coco Right Bungled’
Strictly speaking, Madam Malkin’s was the first incident. However, that’s already passed and there’s nothing to be done about it. So, I let myself fall in to my own mind and pull up the words from elsewhere. As the memories filled me, I began transcribing the scenes as they had been written in the book. Some phrases caught my attention, some details where my brother was not directly mentioned but were caused by his actions
‘… name’s Malfoy, Draco Malfoy…’
‘Don’t want to go making friends with the wrong sort, do you, Potter?’
‘Malfoy’s father didn’t need an excuse to go to the dark side.’
‘SLYTHERIN… Not Slytherin, not Slytherin…’
‘Crabbe and Goyle sniggered… criticizing everyone except Malfoy, who he seemed to like…’
‘Malfoy’s got my Remembrall, Professor.’
‘Come and get it, Potter! … No Crabbe and Goyle up here…’
‘Wizard’s duel. Wands only - no contact… Malfoy tricked you.’
‘Ron dived at Malfoy…I hate them both… Malfoy and Snape…’
‘… looking for someone to practice on… Report him! … I don’t want more trouble… Longbottom, you’ve got no brains… I’m worth twelve of you, Malfoy!’
‘Malfoy had seen the dragon… we have the invisibility cloak, Malfoy doesn’t know…’
‘… the forbidden forest… I won’t go at night! … Malfoy let out a terrible scream…’
With a curse, I set about organizing the pages into major events. The gnat was responsible for some of the more integral bits of this year -but how much was truly necessary? How much could I take over? How much could I let go? Did I need to bother myself with Tibble’s survival at all? If this world is truly fated to be saved, does it matter if I hold back my brother?
Yes. The answer is yes. If I want to ensure my family’s epilogue I need to keep the story mostly consistent. Tapping my quill down I separated the key events.
Year 1 - Things Coco Right Bungled
1. Hogwarts Express - begins Tibble’s mistrust for Slytherin, helps him bond with Weasley
2. Longbottom - Mocking, hexing, and steals Remembrall, opens door for Tibble to join Gryff team as seeker
3. Midnight Duel and Dragon set up - leads trio to find Fluffy and location of the philosopher’s stone, leads to detention for Coco, Granger, Longbottom, and Tibble which is how Tibble sees Quirrell drinking unicorn blood without knowing what he’s seeing
I tapped the parchment with my quill several times as I thought about it. Honestly, all the other things my brother was written to do were casual insults and mockery. They didn’t truly matter, all they did was feed whatever rivalry the two boys had -and got Draco a black eye in a quidditch match. But if I wanted to preserve my knowledge of the future, I needed these things to still happen. There are many things that were simply beyond me to change anyway. Like the base of my brothers personality -so if I sent him to Tibble’s cabin on the train he’d likely turn off the boy with some casual insult or another.
I sat there, writing in the margins of the parchment and jotting down ideas. Spells I needed to learn that would help me, conditions I would need to manufacture, lines I would recite if my brother didn’t.
“Dobs?”
With a puff, the house elf appeared, “Yes, Miss Medea, Dobby is here.”
“What is Draco doing right now?”
“Mister Draco has requested Master’s assistance with his new broom,” Dobby paused, briefly, as if considering if he should hold back some details. He decided he should not, “Mister Draco is performing maintenance on his Nimbus. Mister Draco had Dobby put his Comet into storage. Master has refused to allow Mister Draco to smuggle in his new broom.”
I smiled at that -when we were at Diagon earlier in the month Father and Draco had already bought his Comet 260. So, when a week and a half later the Nimbus 2000 was released, I told Father how shocking it was he would let us be second best. The next day we’d both woken up to a Nimbus outside our room and a note from Father that said, ‘I have it on good authority you should store your Comet. Practice well so I can go see you play quidditch. Love, Father.’
“Probably for the best, honestly.” I sifted through the parchment until I found what I wanted, an envelope with a deep green wax seal that I’d penned earlier. It was addressed to a lawyer in one of the magical towns closest to the Manor, “I need you to owl this at the beginning of November. The wizard it is addressed to will handle the rest.”
“Dobby will not let you down, Miss Medea. Dobby will handle it well.” His hands carefully wrapped around the edges of the envelope and my eyes softened.
“I know you will, Dobs. When you owl it, make sure you use a common owl. I don’t want this tied back to Malfoy Manor.”
I patted Dobby’s head and dismissed him. I spent the rest of that night thinking about how much I had to do over the next year. It wasn’t until late night turned to early morning that I finally fell asleep.